Thursday, January 15, 2009

Kimchi withdrawl

We're back! Well, kind of. We arrived in Cleveland on Tuesday night at Michael's parents house and have been trying to recover from jet lag and the 14 hour time change. For some reason it was easier when we arrived in Korea. But after not sleeping for most of the night, Naomi got up at 5:30am ravenously craving rice and kimchi (and that was after a hamburger feast last night!) We were super busy the last week in Korea, so we have a whole bunch of stuff we still want to write about. But for now, we have snow on our minds, and our last day in Cholla was very snowy. Because it was a little difficult to travel, we went to this Buddhist temple that was a short drive from Mr. Oh's place. When we arrived, there was some talking with the people that run the office there, and it turned out that we would have dinner there, do a short ceremony with the head monk, and then have tea with him. While we waited for the afternoon practice to end, we walked around the snow filled temple, and it slowly became dark with the moon rising. Beautiful! Then we had a simple vegetarian dinner with the monk and the sort of pre-monk women that practice at the temple. After dinner, the monk performed a small ceremony with us in the main temple, which was really interesting. We then retired to his house and drank tea for about two hours which they make from wild tea plants around the temple. It was a really nice last day in Cholla-do. Below is one of the stone spirits that guards the walkaway to the temple.

The morning we left, Michael and I took one last walk around the village near Mr. Oh's studio, and admired the snow on the rice fields.And now back in Cleveland, we are experiencing single digit temperatures during the day, and quite a lot of snow. The river behind Michael's parents house is half-way frozen. This treacherous weather has given us a good excuse to stay in and sleep (or not sleep) at all hours of the day and night. Don't worry - there's still more to come about some of the adventures we had before we left. Hope everyone is staying warm!

6 comments:

welcome back to the states you two, that shot of the snow and rice fields looks similar to mitchell county ina way, minus the rice fields of course. Way cold down here now too, one degree at the house this a.m., pipes frozen, boohooo. see ya two soon

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